Voice, touch and motion are clear winners at CES

In no big way, but a lot of small ones, natural user interfaces eked out a clear win here at International CES.

Companies at the Las Vegas gadget fest have highlighted an array of ways in which consumers will increasingly be able to use voice, touch and motion to control their phones, computers and TVs.

Intel showed off ultrabooks that feature tilt sensors allowing users to angle their computers to control video games a la Wii controllers (ahem, big, heavy Wii controllers). It also highlighted built in credit card readers that work by merely tapping the card to the palm rest.

Lastly, the chip giant announced a partnership with Nuance to bring voice control features to laptops. The service will be built into the computer (i.e. won’t limp along as it searches for meaning in the cloud). It will also learn your accent, works in nine languages and doesn’t require a headset, said Peter Mahoney, chief marketing officer for Nuance.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer announced that the company’s popular Kinect controller for Xbox will be available for the Windows operating system on Feb. 1. Kinect allows users to play games and navigate menus through midair gestures and voice commands on its gaming console, but developers have hacked together loads of other uses for the product (after Microsoft thought better of its initial instinct to prosecute them).

Among many other things, Kinect has been put to work on robots, in surgery and at archaeological digs. Microsoft hasn’t highlight specific applications for Kinect on computers, but clearly expects the developer community to get equally creative this time around.

“Samsung is redefining what a TV can do so people can use more intuitive ways to control their entertainment experiences, maintain closer contact to people that are important to them, and easily manage and share content across multiple screens,” said Hyun-suk Kim, an executive vice president at Samsung, in a statement.

Apple, of course, is widely rumored to be developing a TV that will feature Siri-like voice control.

These are still early days in natural user interfaces for consumer products and we’re going to see a lot of experimentation — and plenty of applications that are more gimmicky than useful. Natural user interfaces aren’t automatically more natural if they’re overly complex or clunky.

The goal here is that users shouldn’t have to learn a new language — as they did with the mouse and graphical user interface — to communicate with devices. If the gestures a gadget understands are unintuitive for humans, or the voice commands too literal and specific, this will all miss the point.